Ancestral Mating Strategies VS Modern Mating - Mads Larsen

1. 0:00 – 3:09

   Why Does Mating Need an Ideology?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Why is it useful or interesting to study mating ideologies at all?

   2. MLMads Larsen0:08

      It is the foundation of all social orders. We like to think that politics, philosophy, all those big subjects are what it's all about, but at the foundation, it's how men and women reproduce. Um, and upon that, everything else rests. So, if that falls apart, our societies fall apart too.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:27

      Why does mating need an ideology to sit over it at all? It's a, it's a physical activity. Like, why the need for a story and what it means and how we should do it?

   4. MLMads Larsen0:39

      Because we've so- we've changed so much from our ancestral environment. Um, having people commit to pair bonding for decades and to providing for offspring, to dedicate the resources that that requires needs a lot of coercion. We have our biological impulses, but they do not align very well with modern demands for mating. So, we need, in addition to that, an ideology that compels people to mate, that coerces them, uh, that makes them think that it's their duty to, uh, to pair bond and have children. And the ideology we have now is, compared to previous ideologies, very weak in that regard. We now have an ideology where this has become completely voluntary and where it's, uh, you can make a good case for why perhaps you shouldn't have children, and that's a rather unique situation.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:30

      I like the use of the word coercion there.

   6. MLMads Larsen1:33

      Oh, absolutely. Biological and cultural coercion. It's a huge sacrifice to reproduce and to ha- to make peop- make enough people do that to a significant extent, now that we also have, uh, effective contraception, it's really difficult.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:49

      Right. So, what is it that's changed primarily in terms of the demands on mating and resource supply in the modern world, or even in the developed world, compared with 10,000, 50,000 years ago?

   8. MLMads Larsen2:06

      (laughs) So much. Um, there are several factors. Contraception is huge. Before you just needed to wanted to copulate, and if you did that enough, you'd have children. And then you'd be, uh, coerced by your communities to pair bond and take care of that children- that child until it's, uh, big enough. Uh, in the modern world, so we've now made, uh, we've deconnected copulation from reproduction. And also in these, uh, industrialized environments we have, children have become much more expensive. Instead of being free labor, they're a huge cost. Also, we have an ideology that over the past millennium has become more and more individualistic. So, we're not necessarily convinced that God is forcing us to have children because that is the meaning of life. Uh, we now think that perhaps being single and traveling and taking care of ourselves is more important than putting more children out into the world. And in addition, um, at the moment, we have this, uh, uh, quite, uh, significant uncertainty about the future that also disincentivizes reproduction.

2. 3:09 – 12:33

   Our Ancestors’ Typical Mating Strategies

   1. CWChris Williamson3:09

      Mm-hmm. What do you think is the ancestrally typical mating strategy for humans over time? I know that we've had a few human ancestors, and then we kind of had a little bit of a, a movement. What was the journey through, uh, human predecessor mating systems?

   2. MLMads Larsen3:26

      You're thinking the past six million years?

   3. CWChris Williamson3:28

      Yeah, yeah. Give us the story of... S- s- start six million years ago. We'll take it from there.

   4. MLMads Larsen3:32

      Yeah, so we started out like most vertebrates. We, we mated promiscuously. Uh, that means that, uh, we probably lived together in groups, multi-male female, multi-male, multi-female groups, uh, where, where individuals were f- free to, uh, to copulate, but where reproductive opportunities were mostly channeled to high-status males. And the purpose of that is that you then distribute, uh, the most successful genes within the population, which helps us, uh, adapt more quickly to changes, et cetera. Um, this is what's most common across animal groups. Um, but then some species, um, they develop a need for pair bonding. If you can get paternal investment, if, if, if the males contribute with more than just genes, this can be very beneficial. And this is what happened with, uh, our lineage, with our, with early hominins about four million years ago, where the ecology changed, where it was so beneficial if, if, uh, if males would contribute that we then had a transition. We don't know precisely which way. The main hypothesis is that high-status males started keeping harems and providing for females, and then there's an alternative hypothesis that is rather new but quite interesting that this was a sneaky new strategy for low-status males to be allowed to, uh, to copulate and reproduce if they offered provisioning and protection to females.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:52

      Wow. It was like the, uh, prehistoric simp version.

   6. MLMads Larsen4:58

      Yeah, it's an, it's an interesting hypothesis. This is a, a scholar, he's a, a theoretical biologist who did mathematical models, and he just couldn't make it add up for high-status, uh, males. It didn't... It, it would never make sense for them to go along with that initial transition from promiscuous mating to pair bonding, polygynous pair bonding. It made a lot more sense that those males that were excluded from mating saw as, uh, offspring needed more, uh, more help, more provisioning, they were, they were, uh, more dependent on the females, that they would now go in and make the deal that, "Okay, I will provide you with calories and protection, but then you let me have sex with you exclusively, so I know that your offspring are mine."

   7. CWChris Williamson5:41

      Oh.

   8. MLMads Larsen5:41

      And then the females had to make a trade-off. Do you want the good genes from males that are only willing to contribute with genes, or do you want, uh, a low-status male to be around there and help you get food, help you get protection, help you out with the kid?

   9. CWChris Williamson5:55

      And that would result in kind of like a resource acquisition and supply arms race.... between-

   10. MLMads Larsen6:03

       Yeah. Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson6:03

       ... the low-status and the high-status males?

   12. MLMads Larsen6:06

       Yeah. So then this would push, so it would then start because this was so beneficial because across those four million years, the offspring development period doubled. Uh, we just got bigger heads, more helpless when we were born. So it became more and more beneficial to, uh, pass, um, the good genes and instead get, uh, a male that would help you out through the most vulnerable years, so through the pregnancy and then in the beginning phase of, uh, when, when the child needed the, uh, the provisioning the most.

   13. CWChris Williamson6:32

       Yeah. I mean-

   14. MLMads Larsen6:32

       And then, uh, th- this developed until around two million years ago when most, uh, most homo communities consisted of mostly, uh, mostly faithful females who are provisioning males, and then a small number of polygamists and a small number of promiscuous maters because it would never, um... it would always, in some instances, be beneficial for the female to choose the superior genes of a high-status male rather, uh, than get a provisioning low-status male to, to c- to, uh, as the father. So this is, this is a competing hypothesis-

   15. CWChris Williamson7:04

       Yeah.

   16. MLMads Larsen7:04

       ... that intuitively i- it seems interesting.

   17. CWChris Williamson7:09

       Just how rare is male parental investment in the mammal and primate world?

   18. MLMads Larsen7:16

       Uh, pair bonding?

   19. CWChris Williamson7:17

       M- yeah. Or-

   20. MLMads Larsen7:18

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson7:18

       And male, male parental investment primarily.

   22. MLMads Larsen7:20

       Yeah. So, um, I think among mammals, it's 10%, uh, do pair bonding, and a- among primates, it's 29%. But the reason why we think that, uh, our lineage were promiscuous maters six million years ago is that, uh, chimpanzees and bonobos are promiscuous maters. And once a lineage has evolved pair bonding, it is so beneficial that it's exceptionally rare that you de-evolve from it. That's why we assume that six million years ago, we also had, uh, promiscuous ancestors.

   23. CWChris Williamson7:52

       Interesting. Okay, so two million years. What happens next? Because we go through some rapid changes over, from then until now.

   24. MLMads Larsen8:02

       Yeah, so the interesting part is that although it became highly beneficial with pair bonding, there was little pressure on males for not wanting multiple, uh, females to want to mate promiscously or po- or polygynously. And likewise, while it was beneficial for females to opt for the provisioning of low-status males, there was little pressure on them for not wanting or desiring a more successful mate. So what we see, what is quite interesting, is that for those two million years, the norm was monogamous pair bonding with some polygyny. But, um, a really superior, uh, forager just couldn't provide for that many, for that many females. But we see that with agriculture, that took off and, um, resulted in, in pretty extreme, uh, uh, polygyny at, in, in the most, um, inequitous environments.

   25. CWChris Williamson8:51

       But that would've been... When was the agricultural revolution? 15,000 years ago? Something like that? 20,000 years ago?

   26. MLMads Larsen8:56

       Around 12.

   27. CWChris Williamson8:57

       Yeah. Okay, so-

   28. MLMads Larsen8:58

       And then it, the, the main period was from when, around 7,000 years ago, all the best agricultural land had been taken. So then if, if you wanted to grow, what you had to do was, um, was to take land from others, and that created a, a 2,000-year period from 7,000 to 5,000 years ago that had a pretty bizarre mating regime. I don't know if you're familiar with this.

   29. CWChris Williamson9:19

       No. Tell me, tell me.

   30. MLMads Larsen9:21

       Yeah, so, uh, I think you've cited this research. I think, uh, when, uh, I saw your, your episode, uh, with, with, uh, Harinam. He cited this study from, uh, Karmin et al in 2015, and he cited the original hypothesis there where the original researchers thought that what had happened 7,000 to 5,000 years ago that there were just these extreme levels of polygyny, uh, that, uh, the Y chromosome diversity in our lineage, uh, was reduced by 95%, meaning that 19 out of 20 males disappeared while the f- uh, the X chromosome diversity increased in line with population growth. And if you think about it, that doesn't make sense. It's just not plausible knowing what we know about human behavior. Why would ev- so you could imagine that for one generation, a patriarch might castrate every other male and just impregnate all the females, but that wouldn't make evolutionary sense for him to do in the next generation when all the, all the men are his sons, and this would be an extremely unstable system. And that this would happen all over the world for 2,000 years, it just seems implausible. So in 2018, a new main hypothesis was established that speaks no more favorably of our ancestors' mating practices, and what probably happened was that for those 2,000 years all, everyone did, uh, in order to be able to grow their tribes, because the only way to grow was to take the fields of your neighbor. So then you had a universal system of intertribal raiding where you, when, when your kin group was strong enough, you would go to your neighbors, kill all the males, and take all the females and all the fields, and that was yours. And people kept doing this for 2,000 years, uh, until 95% of their regional male DNA was just wiped off the, off the genetic slate. So it's, yeah, 2,000 years of, of universal genocide and rape-
3. 12:33 – 18:52

   The Oldest Mating Ideology

   1. CWChris Williamson12:33

      so w- what... Given your research, looking at this sort of journey of mating ideologies over time, what is the furthest back that you've managed to find? Now obviously, as you say, uh, some kind of prototypical religion bonds groups together in a way that civilizes them beyond what they normally would. And given that so much of what we were driven by previously, the motivation, was very heavily mating-derived, or at least mating-

   2. MLMads Larsen12:59

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson12:59

      ... was one of the outcomes that we wanted, I suppose you could say that any ideology that cohesives a group together beyond kin is a mating ideology.

   4. MLMads Larsen13:08

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson13:08

      But what about when it becomes a little bit more sort of specific about w- what you should... what a man's role is, what a woman's role is, how we should combine all of this together?

   6. MLMads Larsen13:19

      Yeah, um, that's a good intuition to have, that that is the kind of civilizing direction. But the ideology, mating ideology, didn't change that much from the period we've described now, and up until, um, the Church's dissolution of Europe's tribes about a thousand years ago. We can call that ideology that's often called heroic love. So, if you wanna start following the mating ideologies we've had for, through antiquity up until the Church's dissolution of the tribes, heroic love, and it's, it's, uh, it's, um, it's, it's a term that's a little bit (laughs) problematic, uh, 'cause the point with it was that during this regime, a woman had to always be ready to submit to the greater warrior. You didn't necessarily have, uh, feudal rulers or other state structures that could protect people. People, always up until this time, lived in kin groups, and if other groups came and defeated you, then the men would be killed and enslaved, and the women would often be captured. So, if women wanted a chance to survive and protect themself and their children, they now had to submit to whomever had killed their father or their husband. So, this was, uh, this was an extremely misogynistic rape culture, and this is what marked... y- up, up until, up until a thousand years ago. And, and that-

   7. CWChris Williamson14:37

      From?

   8. MLMads Larsen14:37

      ... from when, from the beginning of agriculture, from that period we talked earlier, where what, this, this was the original patriarchy, where the male lineages was matter, and women are... They had different way of, of conceptualizing this, but women were more like soil where the patriarchal seed were put. So, this way, as long as you had these beliefs, you could just capture as many women as, as you, as you wanted or were able to-

   9. CWChris Williamson14:58

      Mm-hmm.

   10. MLMads Larsen14:58

       ... and then keep growing your kin group.

   11. CWChris Williamson15:00

       I suppose, as well, this heroic love narrative is, uh, a useful strategy to legitimize to the men what they are doing, but also as a coping strategy to dampen down the discomfort of what the women are subjected to.

   12. MLMads Larsen15:17

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson15:18

       That if there is an ideology that sits over the top, that maybe this is the way that mating is supposed to be done. Maybe it is beneficial that your last husband was killed and murdered, and that now you have a new one because he's evidently the more heroic of the two. Therefore, it is quite right that you should go... As opposed to, "The person that I cared about has just been dismembered in front of me, and now this guy that I don't know." Like, that's not a particularly reassuring story. Whereas the heroic love narrative, uh, it's useful for both sexes in some regards.

   14. MLMads Larsen15:52

       In some regards, but I'm, I'm sure it was an absolute nightmare for these people that had to go through this. And what drove much of this was, uh, that these kin groups generally practiced polygynous mating. So, uh, you would have elite individuals who would hoard women as wives, concubines, and sex slaves. So for the, for the low-value men, they didn't have access to pair bonding or, or copulation. So then, they were driven throughout antiquity to when they had a strong enough position to go to whichever or whomever their neighbors were, and then kill the men, take their stuff, and take their women. So this, this polygynous mating that marked this period under heroic love drove a lot of war, a lot of social instability. Um, it, it was a quite enormous change that happened when the Church imposed lifelong monogamy, even on the most superior of males. That, that changed everything.

   15. CWChris Williamson16:46

       When did that happen?

   16. MLMads Larsen16:49

       Well, the, the Roman Empire, uh, played around with monig- monogamy, but they were never very serious about it. And then the Church started imposing it in the fourth century, but also not very seriously. And then you have a period that's referred to as the Gregorian Reform at the beginning of the second millennium, that, uh, you had a lot of church councils that worked with these matters 'cause the Church wanted to grab more power over people. And if you can control their mating, if you can control their marriages, their sexual behavior, et cetera, that gives you a lot of power over powerful men. So, this is when they, uh, dissolved Europe's tribes through prohibiting cousin marriage, changing rules, uh, for inheritance and ownership, and then imposing lifelong monogamy, which was a, a very unusual, unique, rather extreme way of thinking of mating. But when you do this, this... If you wanna understand the origins of the modern world, this was it, 'cause this... Then you create the sexual egalitarianism. This is how you make parents invest in children. This is where you prepare for growth, and where you start creating a different, more individualistic psychology, different way of thinking, you'll lower men's testosterone. So instead of, uh, superior men competing all their life to acquire more women, you get to compete until you get one, and then you have to, uh, put your efforts in more, in a more productive direction.

   17. CWChris Williamson18:10

       How does it help investment in children? Why was there not a massive amount of investment in children during the heroic mating era?

   18. MLMads Larsen18:20

       ... uh, because you would have one father with several women with a bunch of children, and you would try to maximize that to the extent that your resources allowed. So, you just had a, a lot less attention per child, and you also didn't have an ideology where you should necessarily invest so much in your children. They were more expendable. While if, if then these, uh, these children are distributed over more men and you have a more limited amount of children, then you will be more incentivized to take care of those children that you do have.

4. 18:52 – 23:20

   Why Churches Imposed Monogamy

   1. MLMads Larsen18:52

   2. CWChris Williamson18:52

      What is the reason for the Church or anybody wanting to impose some sort of rule? From a, uh, civilization design perspective-

   3. MLMads Larsen19:04

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson19:04

      ... what was the advantage or the change that they were looking to enact? What was the outcome that they wanted by encouraging lifelong monogamy?

   5. MLMads Larsen19:12

      Well, that's really interesting. In hindsight, if we like modernity, we think it was brilliant. But when we look at the document, uh, that exists at the time, it's a bit of a mystery. Uh, we can suspect certain things, um, through dissolving Europe's tribes and changing, uh, the rules for ownership and inheritance. The Church by the, by the 10th century had grabbed 40% of the agricultural land in Western Europe, so that was good. You could see that as a pretty strong incentive that when you die, instead of your land being passed on to your kin, you now give it to the Church so you don't have to go to hell. That's a pretty strong material incentive. And then the other aspect, as I mentioned earlier, is that powerful men that hoard a lot of women, if you can impose on them certain mating structures, then you as, as the Church, if you have to, uh, acknowledge or permit their marriages, if you can restrict them, then the Church get power over powerful men, which is another, uh, good understandable material incentive. And then it's, it's all just speculation in terms of what the spiril- spiritual ramifications are, what they might have suspected the long-term consequences would be. But my impression from having studied a lot of deep cultural changes is that to some extent, things just happen. It's, it's just a bunch of people doing a bunch of things, and then it almost magically sorts itself out, and nobody really understands what's happening when it's happening. And then 100 years later or in the modern times, historians look back and kind of try to make sense of what it was. But, uh, generally there aren't that many grand architects that have a s- particular vision that they're able to impose on their culture.

   6. CWChris Williamson21:00

      Yeah. What's that quote about, uh, "Life happens forwards but only makes sense in reverse"? And I guess that-

   7. MLMads Larsen21:06

      Absolutely.

   8. CWChris Williamson21:07

      ... his- history is kind of the same, that we can post hoc rationalize what was it that the Church's grand plan was? Whereas, you know, it's much easier to go for a simple explanation, which was they wanted to control powerful men. These powerful men had lots of resources. If the Church slot themselves in between those men and one of the things that they want the absolute most, which is women-

   9. MLMads Larsen21:29

      Yeah. Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson21:29

       ... because presumably they couldn't slot themselves in between the men and their resources. Like, unless the Church is gonna wage a war and say, "Right now, half of this farm is ours, now half of this house is ours, now duh-duh-duh-duh-duh," uh, it's a much more crafty, subversive strategy to be able to somehow make divine the union between a man and a woman and then to, for you to be the arbiter that sits in between them. Yeah, it, I, I can totally see how it gives you power over powerful men. Well, one thing that hasn't been mentioned so far which I thought would've come up is, uh, sexual redistribution, right?

   11. MLMads Larsen22:04

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson22:04

       That if you have high amounts of inequality within a sexual system, you get young male syndrome, it's not very good. Ha, d- d- does this play a role at this stage? Or was it just such an accepted part of the way that the world existed that, that no one was really bothered about the chaos that came along with it?

   13. MLMads Larsen22:24

       No, in, in hindsight we see that it was hugely beneficial. The modern world would not have happened if, if that redistribution of women hadn't happened that the Church imposed on Medieval Europeans. But whether anyone in the Church were able to predict what greater sexual egalitarianism would have for consequences, for social stability, the potential for growth, for peace, et cetera, I don't know. I, I'd, I'd like to think they were that smart, but, uh, I-

   14. CWChris Williamson22:50

       (laughs)

   15. MLMads Larsen22:50

       ... I kind of doubt it.

   16. CWChris Williamson22:51

       (laughs)

   17. MLMads Larsen22:51

       Maybe they noticed as, as they went along that they saw there were beneficial effects. I don't know. But, uh, yeah, the, the end result was, was quite impressive, but how it came about, who the architects were, if they really imagined this, I'm kinda doubtful if, if, if, if they understood the ramifications of what they were doing.

   18. CWChris Williamson23:09

       Okay, so, uh, heroic love-

   19. MLMads Larsen23:12

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson23:12

       ... finishes. The Church comes in. "Sorry, men. No more gangbangs for you." What comes next?

5. 23:20 – 34:33

   When Courtship Was Introduced

   1. CWChris Williamson23:20

   2. MLMads Larsen23:20

      Well, this is fascinating, and this speaks again to how, how nobody's in charge. So, I, some of these mating ideologies are what I refer to as cultural dissolvents. These are mating ideologies upon which you cannot build social order, but they kinda make you lose faith in the previous ideology. So, when courtly love, uh, was, uh, created and disseminated through romances and ballads from the 12th century, this, this was an ideology with values and norms that primarily undermined heroic love. So, it had an, an exaggeration of the emotion of love as something that was incredibly strong and irresistibly and that lasted a lifetime, and this was meant to discourage high-status men, uh, from being polygynous. That if you pick just one woman, that's gonna last for life and it's gonna give you this special ecstasy that you can't get if you have more women and also if you force yourself on a woman. So, what men should do, and this is what ballads and romances promote, that instead of being the greatest warrior, well, you also have to be the greatest warrior, but in addition to that-... you have to talk to women, you have to use sophisticated social skills, you have to flirt. And instead of just raping her after you killed her husband, you have to make, uh, the woman feel a high, uh, degree of lust and love. So when she can't help herself from having sex with you because she, she lusts you so much and she loves you so much, that's when you can have sex. So you have all these, you have all these values that's, if you just read the romances unbalanced then you don't know what they're reacting against. It's kinda hard to make sense of, but when you know the tenants of heroic love, you see that all these elements of courtly love are constructed, in a sense, to undermine those, those strong beliefs from the previous regime. And also, it has to do with the new sociality that when you lived in kinship groups, um, you stuck to your own, you were skeptical towards strangers, strangers might wanna kill you and take your stuff. But now that we lived in a feudal Europe where everyone were supposed to be Christian, then we're supposed to have this openness towards strangers, we're supposed to be friendly, courteous, and all these norms that defines courtly love is also the way European Christians were supposed to treat each other and not just women. So you have all this, this, uh, brand new type of sociality that would have never worked in a kinship system, but was crucial for feudal Europe to have an effective, uh, cooperation.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:51

      Mm. So as you're becoming more civilized and as you are, uh, more open to new people, to being friends with people, stuff like pubs and, and ale houses and, and, and things will occur.

   4. MLMads Larsen26:03

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson26:03

      People will be migrating a little bit more. It's not just my family bonds with the family next door. Okay, so what about, wha- what is the role of marriage? Is marriage widespread at this point? Is it that you go through the church and the church does its thing? What about the role of no sex before marriage, uh, and those sorts of impositions?

   6. MLMads Larsen26:25

      Yeah. So the transition was before marriages were private, but with the Gregorian reform, they had to be church marriages, which is also very important for courtly love. Uh, and what's unique about ... It's something called the European marriage pattern that develops here, 'cause this had never happened before. No kin groups had been dissolved the way the church did it. Uh, so you got a unique situation in the West. And what happens is that you have... when you can no longer move in with your kin, you have to start accumulating research sources. So people's marriage age were pushed up from, say from their teens or early 20s, up to their late 20s. So you shortened people reproductive period, and this was crucial, because under, in antiquity, we practiced what you could call fourth trimester abortion. You might know this from Vikings. You have the babies you have, and then you have a look at them, and then you kill the ones you can't raise. So this was how you kept the population in check. And they tended to kill more females than males, so you'd have, uh, you'd have a low sex ratio. Um, what they did now because you, individual life became sacred, you now have to restrict people's sexuality. They had to have less sex. And one way that they did this was through this European marriage pattern where your reproductive period didn't start until you're around 30 years old. That way you didn't have more children. So it was very crucial in this period that people's sexuality were restricted, otherwise you'd run into Malthusian crisis 'cause you'd have too many children. But what happened, interestingly, is after, uh, the Black Death in the mid-14th century, n- north of Europe lost over, in my country, lost over 50% of the population, and around Europe to a third to a half was lost. So in the four, in the 1400s you had what's called the, the sexual laxness of the 15th century, where people were, uh, were having a lot more promiscuous sex, sleeping around, et cetera, et cetera, because their environment could afford it. And then when we rebuilt the population around year 1500, that's when you have the Reformation, that's when you have a re-tightening of the sexual norms because we couldn't afford it anymore because we'd refilled our poor population, and that's when you get Puritanism, et cetera, et cetera.

   7. CWChris Williamson28:33

      What ... Uh, y- you were talking about this sort of window, this reproductive window that, um, th- age 30-ish, late 20s was important. Is that people were told that they shouldn't reproduce after 30 or they weren't permitted to reproduce until 30?

   8. MLMads Larsen28:48

      So before, when you had polygyny and you lived in kin groups, you would have a man with a lot of resource and he'd marry every time he feel like it, and then he'd, if he'd married a, see a woman at 20 and he'd be 30 or 40, and she'd just start reproducing right away. And the same if they were younger, you would, you would always have a place to live, you'd m- move in next to your kin on, on your kin group's land. Now in feudal Europe, you'd have to accumulate resources to be able to afford what's called a neo-local resident. You don't live with your family, you live on your own. So you'd have to be on lab- men and women would have to be on labor markets typically in their 20s until they had accumulated enough resources to get their own place, and this is what pushed up, uh, the marriage age-

   9. CWChris Williamson29:28

      So ...

   10. MLMads Larsen29:28

       ... and which, so reproductive, reproduction didn't start until typically in your late 20s for women.

   11. CWChris Williamson29:34

       Wow, 'cause I, you know, Game of Thrones as my greatest window into an accurate historical representation of what would have happened-

   12. MLMads Larsen29:42

       Mm-hmm.

   13. CWChris Williamson29:42

       ... in medieval times for reproduction, you know, you've got a lot of essentially child and teen marriages and women occurring, and I certainly know that some of the aristocracy were doing this. Was that only a behavior or a trend that occurred in the upper echelons of the, the higher-

   14. MLMads Larsen30:00

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson30:01

       ... nobility?

   16. MLMads Larsen30:01

       Those who had resources. So you see that the very highest, the, the highest classes are those that are marked the la- the least by these changes to the past millennium of mating moralities. They still, uh, uh, the very highest status men, they still had lovers on the side, they still had a, a couple of wives for a few centuries longer than they were supposed to. So they got away from this and, and the church tried to wrest power from them, but it was a battle. They were still powerful. So yeah, among the higher classes you typically would, would marry still when you were around 20 perhaps.

   17. CWChris Williamson30:30

       Right. So this is really interesting. Obviously we're gonna get into it as we continue down this little journey through time. But-... a lot of the conversations at the moment are, for the first time since records began, more women are childless at 30 than with children at 30.

   18. MLMads Larsen30:46

       Mm-hmm.

   19. CWChris Williamson30:46

       But it seems to me, like if we look only 500, 600 years ago, you're maybe going to see very similar sort of fertility patterns amongst women, albeit for very different reasons than-

   20. MLMads Larsen30:58

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson30:58

       ... individual choice and, and traveling the world and getting an education and stuff like that.

   22. MLMads Larsen31:02

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson31:03

       Uh, but yeah, you're going to see b- because of the demands that were placed on their requirement to accumulate resources, both as men and as women, in order to be able to get started with a family, plus-

   24. MLMads Larsen31:13

       Yep.

   25. CWChris Williamson31:13

       ... you don't have quite as sophisticated social safety net, so you do have this Malthusian problem that keeps everything down. So it's like, right, okay, we need to restrict, restrict, restrict.

   26. MLMads Larsen31:21

       Mm-hmm.

   27. CWChris Williamson31:21

       It's basically like an entry price into a nightclub that, uh, up until the point at which you can pay the entry price, you can't go to the dance, right?

   28. MLMads Larsen31:30

       Yep. Yep.

   29. CWChris Williamson31:30

       The da- the dance being having, having kids.

   30. MLMads Larsen31:34

       Yeah, yeah. And also at, at this point, what was characteristic of the, uh, European marriage pattern was an exceptionally high percentage of never-married women. In a polygamous system, mostly all women are married. Under this system, it had extraordinary high percentage of typically 10%, which to us sounds very low, but at the time, that was unheard of. So around 10% of women, uh, never married during this regime.
6. 34:33 – 42:39

   The Basis For Our Current Mating Ideology

   1. CWChris Williamson34:33

      courtly love?

   2. MLMads Larsen34:35

      Well, the, the mating ideology that the society was built on then is something called companionate love. So this was a very pragmatic ideology and very different from courtly loving. Courtly love, you and I, we are aristocratic knights, and we're gonna travel through Europe to find our one true love, and we're gonna fall incredibly much in love, and we're gonna live in bless- bless forever after. Naturally, this was not the reality for European peasants. So the ideology of companionate love is that a man and a woman shall marry for life through an arranged marriage, whether they like each other is not, or not, it's not a big deal, and their primary task is to run the farm as partners, to run the farm and keep their children alive. So we're not gonna sleep around, we're not gonna divorce and find somebody else. We're just gonna huddle down and make sure that as many children as possible are alive in the spring. So it's a very pragmatic, very unromantic, uh, ideology. It's about submitting to the needs of your family and your community and not giving in to emotions or erotic or romantic impulses. So this was the reality for European peasants from the begin- from the end of, from, from the, from the first sexual revolution when the kin groups were dissolved and all the way up to 1750, which was the West's second sexual revolution. This was when you, this was a period of companionate love, arranged marriages, pragmatism, and then you had a period before 1500 with sexual laxness and then a period afterwards with Puritanism, uh, to restrict people, people's impulses to avoid Malthusian crises.

   3. CWChris Williamson36:16

      Right. I was g- I was just about to ask why the Puritanism?

   4. MLMads Larsen36:21

      Well, after this period of sexual laxness, when we had rebuilt her population and when we entered into a period of, of stagnation and s- stagnant per capita growth, we needed to prevent Europeans from, uh, having too many children, to having premarital sex, extramarital sex.... and the way we have done this in the West is to villainize female sexuality. Women are the sexual selectors and in order to prevent extramarital sex from happening, or premarital sex, uh, the church has, in those instances, gone after the women. Uh, so you'll see in the 1400s, female sexuality is acknowledged and to an extent celebrated, and then when Puritanism comes, uh, the ideologist p- f- fe- women do not benefit from sex outside of marriage. Uh, women who are lustful are aligned with Satan, et cetera. So it's a way to oppress women and to coerce them into not having sex that they shouldn't have, which could then contribute to Malthusian crisis. So the choice we face in these situations is either w- we kill babies when they are born, the surplus of them, or we have to find a way to prevent people from having extramarital sex or sex that produces too much babies. And the means we have tended to use in the West is to, uh, demonize female sexuality in those instances.

   5. CWChris Williamson37:48

      Why not try to control male sexuality?

   6. MLMads Larsen37:52

      It's a really good question. If you look at the differences in male and female mating psychology, and, and, and who is in charge on these markets, markets, it seems like the more effective choice, I'm not condoning it, but it seems like the most effective choice to place the cost on the sexual selectors. You could imagine that men are so driven that telling men... Men generally do not have sexual access to women. And to tell men that they shouldn't have sex, number one, it would be harder 'cause they have a stronger drive for short term, uh, relationships. But also, they, that access isn't there for them. While if the women are the ones who make the decisions in these, in these cases of at least the voluntary sex, uh, then having... placing an enormous burden on women that from our modern perspective seems totally misogynistic and unfair, it seems that that would be the more effective way of doing it.

   7. CWChris Williamson38:50

      Yeah, because if you're going to try and restrict men overall, but even now, I'm going to guess that there is still a very large cohort of men, more than 10%, who go to their graves without a family or unmarried. Uh, therefore, you're, you're pointing the finger at the less reliable potential mater. Whereas if you point the finger at the women, it is more likely that... You, you get more bang for your buck, basically, on restriction. But presumably, there must have been... uh, uh, there is, there must be some moralizing around male sexuality too, just probably not quite the same level of demonization that women had.

   8. MLMads Larsen39:28

      Absolutely. So yeah, Puritanism also, uh, it d- demonized promiscuous men in those stories and the literature that exists from this period. The greatest villain is, or, or the favored villain is often a man who is known to have slept around. So promiscuous men are also, uh, put forth as villains and, and, and discouraged, but they, the male sexuality is still acknowledged. There's, there's something pathological about a, a woman who wants to have sex with someone who isn't her husband in the Puritan ideology.

   9. CWChris Williamson40:06

      Mm-hmm.

   10. MLMads Larsen40:06

       It's, uh, if you wanna talk about patriarchal misogyny, the, the Puritans were really, really bad. But then we have to try to then step aside back and, and of course we moralize on it and say that this is terrible, but then we try to understand why did they do this? What was the function of this? Why, why did Puritanism arise in a period when it was crucial for the West to restrain people's sexuality to avoid Malthusian crises?

   11. CWChris Williamson40:33

       Right. Yeah, I understand. If, if everybody is dying of famine and starvation, the difference between the pain of that and the pain of you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage, it, it, it doesn't... yeah, that, that, I can understand.

   12. MLMads Larsen40:46

       Well, we, we have to choose. If, if, if we're not okay with killing babies, and Christians haven't been because of their ideology, while in antiquity people generally were, we have to choose. We either kill babies or restrict people's sexuality or we, or we invent the contraceptives-

   13. CWChris Williamson41:03

       Yeah.

   14. MLMads Larsen41:03

       ... which we got around to later.

   15. CWChris Williamson41:04

       What was the reason for not just killing babies?

   16. MLMads Larsen41:07

       Oh, uh, in, with Christianity, uh, life became sacred. So, uh, the Christians said that you can't take any life. So once a child is... so they didn't, they, uh, uh, criminalized infanticide. So infan- f- infanticide and particularly, uh, female selective infanticide killing, uh, they would typically kill girls 'cause they were costlier, dependent a little bit on the, on the context. But yeah, so the practice of infanticide was just cracked down on really hard by the Christians because i- i- it went against their belief of every life being sacred.

   17. CWChris Williamson41:39

       Yeah, okay. Well, that's interesting that the church's doctrine is, uh, both like giveth and taketh away here, that they have made their own bed. Okay, we say that infanticide isn't good. We value human life. Oh fuck, downstream from that, we now have this other problem, which is being able to control populations so that we don't-

   18. MLMads Larsen41:59

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson41:59

       ... get some Fisherian runaway, like, Malthusian bullshit. Also not good. Okay.

   20. MLMads Larsen42:05

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson42:05

       So, I mean, and one other thing that, that's kind of, I guess, interesting to add here is that the Middle Ages didn't finish until the 1500s, right?

   22. MLMads Larsen42:11

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CWChris Williamson42:11

       We're still in the Middle Ages from pretty much fall of Rome, 500, to 1500s-ish.

   24. MLMads Larsen42:17

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CWChris Williamson42:17

       Like, that's ju- it's just one big, long fucking medieval, like, m- m- hodgepodge, right? Then we get to, you said 1750-ish.

   26. MLMads Larsen42:26

       Mm-hmm. Yep, yep.

   27. CWChris Williamson42:28

       I mean, you know, we're talking now only 250 years ago, and it feels like there is an-

   28. MLMads Larsen42:33

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CWChris Williamson42:33

       ... awful lot of ground to cover, uh, in terms of sexual ideology. So what, what happens

7. 42:39 – 48:38

   The Post-1750 Sexual Revolutions

   1. CWChris Williamson42:39

      1750?

   2. MLMads Larsen42:40

      So that's the West's, uh, second sexual revolution. This was one of individual choice. So...What we don't think about in the West, this is, it's, uh, evolutionary psychologist called Manolis Apostolou who's done great work on this. How throughout human history, we've had arranged marriages. He makes the case that, uh, the human species is the only species on the planet where men select other men for reproduction. This has always been the case, and during agriculture, it was more the kin group. Uh, and then, um, after the, the first sexual revolution, this was more a matter for the nuclear family, meaning the patriarch, the father of the family. So, human men and women, this is important to understand, to understand the present day mating dysfunction. We did not evolve under regimes of individual choice. We generally, we had an influence, but we generally didn't pick and attract our own mates. We were given mates by our families and communities. So, our inab- our somewhat weak ability, or many people's weak ability to flirt and attract partners, attract short and long-term partners, s- this is thought of as- as a form of mismatch due to individuals not having that responsibility in the past, that they, in the West, started getting from 750. So, what happened with the dissolution of Europe's tribes is that our psychology changed fundamentally. This was the biggest change since introduction of agriculture. So, we were put on a journey then, say for eight, 900 years ago, toward ever greater individualization. More and more and more and more non-stop. Still ongoing and it's not gonna stop for a while. And by, by the 18th century, Europeans started more and more thinking that they should be entitled to make their own decisions in terms of mating, copulation and pair bonding. And what facilitated this materially is that you had this commercial revolution where more and more people worked as servants in their youth for, uh, for cash payments. So, to accumulate these resources to be able to marry, people moved further and further away from family and, uh, they were paid in cash. And this was the material foundation for the West's second sexual revolution. So, among these young proletarians, around 1750, this European marriage pattern just burst and people started having a lot more sex pre-, uh, before marriage, uh, on the side also. So, you had this enormous growth in- in sexual activity, especially among young people, that had enormous consequences. S- and, and this continued, so it wasn't like everybody started riding a way making their own decisions, but it, it started among these young wage earners, and then over the centuries it spread and it, um, and- and the dam completely burst with a third sexual revolution in the 1960s.

   3. CWChris Williamson45:35

      I love the idea that flirting is basically, uh, like an evolutionary anomaly. That if you were to have the ability ancestrally, if- if- if you come from a long line of flirters and your great, great, great, great, great granddaddy, he was a flirter, and the granddaddy before, it's like, "Why?" Like, "Why?"

   4. MLMads Larsen45:58

      Well, l-

   5. CWChris Williamson45:58

      You know, pre- previously you would have just been taking what you wanted. Then after that you would have been told what you wanted. Then after that your dad would've told you what you wanted. And then only 250 years ago would you have actually chosen what you wanted.

   6. MLMads Larsen46:11

      Yeah. Leif Kinnear, who, whom you know, he makes this, this interesting case, uh ... Today, to be an effective flirter, if you're a really good-looking guy and you're really charming, a good flirter and you're short-term oriented, you're gonna have a lot of mating success. In the olden days, there would be a greater, there would be a significant chance that you would get snuffed out. If- if you, uh, if you were a solid guy who created alliances, worked hard, led a family, you would be chosen for reproduction by other men and given to their daughters. If you were just this good-looking Adonis who liked to sleep around, you're probably gonna get kill- killed by the, by the men in the kin group of your latest illicit affair.

   7. CWChris Williamson46:54

      Ah. Yeah, because you're a threat in some regard. Even if- even if you don't get rumbled by the kin group of the men of the woman that you just managed to seduce outside of her marriage and outside of your own marriage.

   8. MLMads Larsen47:07

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson47:07

      Even if you don't get caught by the scruff of the neck by them, you're just going to create a ambient sense of concern and envy and mistrust, because, "Oh, we know that Mads, we've got to be careful about him. Like, he's got the, he's (laughs) got the fucking charm." Like, you know, "I've heard rumors," and then it almost becomes, I guess a l- t- to some degree, a little bit like the witch trials, that you have this ... It's not quite original sin, but it's something inbuilt that will cause other men to feel, uh, envy and jealousy. And way rather than understand and turn it inward and work out what it is that's lacking in them that makes them envious of this person, it's way easier to just moralize about the person that's the out group now and say, "Let's fucking kill him."

   10. MLMads Larsen47:52

       And also, times were really tough a lot of the time. You needed a really solid guy willing to work really hard and do whatever he can to provide for his wife and children to keep them alive. If you're just this charming hottie who likes to, uh, chat up women (laughs) around the farm, it's, that does, that did not generally promote a good genetic legacy. Times, the demands of the times were just different. Times were very different than they are today.

   11. CWChris Williamson48:18

       Are you saying that we are the descendants of the least charismatic, least good-looking, least flirtatious men that existed?

   12. MLMads Larsen48:27

       Well, it depends on the ecology. But yeah, generally our ancestors have not been Lotharios. That's, uh, that's only recently where that has been very beneficial.

   13. CWChris Williamson48:37

       Right. So, we

8. 48:38 – 55:48

   Did the Church Lose Control in 1750?

   1. CWChris Williamson48:38

      get to 1750.

   2. MLMads Larsen48:40

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson48:40

      People are now able to make their own decisions. Uh, I actually, one question there, how is it that the Church loses control? Does the Church feel like it is losing control? Does it try to claw it back in any regard? I know that, uh, in the time of Charles Darwin, uh, you know, Victorian England, we had an awful lot of s- of sexual puritanism there. I think, uh, the year of, the year of Darwin's birth, the total number of British divorces was eight.

   4. MLMads Larsen49:05

      Yeah, yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson49:06

      Not thousands, not hundreds, eight.

   6. MLMads Larsen49:09

      Yeah. No, what happens, 1750 is really interesting 'cause there's a counter-reaction. So we have what we call the Romantic century from 1750 to 1850. So I'm sure with your imagination, you can imagine what happened when this dam burst in 1750. Now we're gonna start sleeping around. Whoops, we haven't invented the contraceptive pill yet. What's gonna happen? So what happens is you have an enormous increase in illegitimate birth. Across Europe, it doubles, triples, quadruples. So what you typically have are all these, uh, low, lower-class women who now can make their own decisions in terms of copulation and pair bonding, and, uh, their ancestors have no experience with this. So we didn't evolve to, uh, see through the intentions of men, we didn't invol- evolve, uh, to assess our ma- our own mate value precisely. So what would happen that you would have a lot of high-status men, or at least higher-status men, say, uh, sons of farmers, uh, urban men who would then go after the daughters of crofters and other at the lower rungs of society, and they would say, "I love you, and I'm gonna marry you, and let's have sex." And they would do that, and when she got pregnant, they would leave her. So in, in Denmark, Norway, up until 730, 734, uh, if you had sex, that was a de facto marriage contract. And then what we see in the beginning of the 1700s, there's a huge increase in women taking men to court for having had sex with them but not marrying them, so they end that law in 1734. So after that, if you get pregnant, y- you're not entitled to marry the guy you had sex with. So from 1750, you get this enormous increase in illegitimate birth. At the worst, in Sweden and in, in Stockholm, 50% of childbirths were by unwed mothers. Lower in rural areas. In Paris, you see an enormous increased amount of abandoned children. So in the, in the late 1700s, there was an ideology, which I also consider as a cultural dissonance 'cause you couldn't build a social order on it, and this was liberty and love. So this is the kind of Casanova ideology where you're supposed to just enjoy sex for the sake of sex. You're supposed to sleep around, follow your lusts. And this was an ideology that spread from the French court and then throughout Europe, and it reached, uh, uh, Scandinavia around 1770. So you had this period where you have certain eccentric milieus where people advocated, "Let's just sleep around. Let's just have a hell of a good time. Let's just party." And this created this enormous burden on women 'cause women were left with the burden of childcare when these libertines left them once they got pregnant. So typically, high-status men took advantage of, of, of impoverished women and then just abandoned them. And this is what laid the foundation for the romantic ideology of the early 1800s. So libertine love undermined companionate love where, where you're just supposed to be pragmatic and double down, take care of your family, and libertine love said, "No, let's just have fun." And then when the social ramific- ramification of that, uh, came, manifested themselves, the counter-reaction was romantic love, which did the same as Puritan love had done, where you again... So libertine love celebrated female sexuality, "Let's just have sex." Romantic love said, "No, women have no benefit from sex outside of marriage. We're all gonna have to stop doing this." And similar to courtly love, it exaggerated the emotional love as something incredibly strong and something that lasted for life. So from then on, men and women were only supposed to have sex within the confines of marriage, and you should be married forever. And this started having an effect around 1850, and then across the West, the legitimacy rate started plummeting. So you see this counter-reaction. First, you dissolve companionate love, then you see the effects of all this promiscuity, and then in order to reduce the suffering of the women that this affects, you have a counter-reaction or romantic love where you then become more Puritan again.

   7. CWChris Williamson53:15

      Right.

   8. MLMads Larsen53:15

      And then you see the effect of that in the statistics.

   9. CWChris Williamson53:17

      Right, you reprioritize the emotional connection, the romantic connection between the man and the woman, and what that does is that, again, creates a, a dampener on the libertine, Casanova guy, lothario-

   10. MLMads Larsen53:30

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson53:30

       ... that's just, okay, yeah, that's so interesting. I, it, it, what I'm seeing here is this, this flip-flop between what seems... And it, sometimes, uh, human nature kind of just bursts through the cracks, it kind of grows and grows and grows enough, and then it splits through, that, um-

   12. MLMads Larsen53:48

       Mm-hmm.

   13. CWChris Williamson53:48

       ... there is, uh, innate desires that people have. Uh, you're also responding to the local resources. So I'm going to guess that around about 1750, uh, agriculture and greenhouses and shit like that meant that the ability to get an amount of food and an amount of living out of a square foot of land would have increased pretty dramatically, which means that this Malthusian problem's no- "Okay, right, so we can't really... We, we, we're no longer limited in terms of food. What's the next thing that we can use? Fuck, they're having sex with each other." Uh, uh, say that it's all about romance. Say that it's all about the, the, the over-prioritize the importance of emotional connection because-

   14. MLMads Larsen54:28

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson54:28

       ... that, that allows us to create... But we've, we've also lost at least a little bit here. We've lost the, um, church's moralization, or at least it sounds like we've lost the church's-

   16. MLMads Larsen54:39

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson54:39

       ... moralization of the act of love.

   18. MLMads Larsen54:42

       Yeah, and the 1800s, this was the time of The Enlightenment. This wa- was about individual rights, uh, empowering individuals, not oppressing them, uh, letting them make their own choices, personal agency, et cetera, et cetera. And this was also at the dawn of The Industrial Revolution. So when this, uh, um, European marriage pattern burst around 1750, we were very fortunate for two reasons, 'cause we now experienced a population explosion.... in going ahead that is still ongoing. Well, I take that back, it's not ongoing anymore. Uh, but we had, we got this re- moving into this period with tremendous economic growth that helped us take care of the population explosion, and also we offloaded an enormous part of our population to America and other, uh, colonial territories. Otherwise, we would have, uh, faced dire trouble in the West, um, as it, as it ch- as the change of our mating practices and also with the reduction mortality from other causes.

   19. CWChris Williamson55:40

       Okay. Then perhaps the shortest, most acute change when it comes to human reproductive history,

9. 55:48 – 1:01:30

   Impact of Introducing Contraception

   1. CWChris Williamson55:48

      the introduction of reliable contraception.

   2. MLMads Larsen55:51

      Well, yeah. So one of the aspects of romantic love is that you have gender inequality. You conceptualize men and women as complementary, that, uh, people are born as incomplete halves, and then to become whole, you have to find, uh, your true love, you have to bond with her, and then you individualize and you become a whole human. So this means that the man is supposed to go out and work and the woman is supposed to stay home and take care of the domestic arena. So they're conceptualized as equal but complementary, but in reality, this drove stark inequality. So the next mating ideology we move to, which is the one we believe in today, it's called confluent love, which is a mating ideology of gender equality, of convenience, reward, and self-realization. And this ideology arose quite a while ago. It was first introduced into Scandinavian literature in 1839, but it had existed in the We- in the West somewhat earlier. So people were thinking about this, that we should get true equality, that men and women should be the same and have the same opportunities, and that we should be able to have sex outside of marriage and sleep around. But the environment wasn't prepared for that. Like you mentioned, this couldn't really be implemented until we invented effective contraception. Otherwise, this kind of mating would have placed too far, too strong of a burden on women. So we see this discussion in Western culture from, say, around 1830, and then with the Darwinian revolution, we start thinking, "Okay, so with romantic love, we thought, obviously this is what God wanted us to do, that we have these impulses that you also mentioned, but that's just a test from God to see if we deserve to go to heaven. So that we want to have sex and that we want to divorce, that's just a test." And also, at the beginning of our conversation, you asked, "Why do we need these ideologies?" And this is precisely why. 'Cause we have these biological impulses to copulate and our, our, um, our love cycle probably evolved to last around three to four years, which was the mating cycle of foragers. So with agriculture, we needed to commit to lifelong monogamy because in case of divorce, you can't split up the fields and, and bring your part of the farm somewhere else. So we were kind of stuck in these marriages that had to last many, many more decades than what we evolved for. So then you need these ideologies to make us fight these urges that we have to sleep around, to ha- to have, uh, we evolved for serial monogamy or serial pair bonding to fight that because the, the agricultural environment and then the modern environment just required something else for us. So then we used religion, we said that this is what God wants, but then with the Darwinian revolution, we start thinking, "Well, if we're animals, we too, then these impulses we have, they're not moral tests. This is our nature." So we started exploring what human mating nature is, and this was a very, uh, strong literary movement in, uh, Scandinavia in the late 1800s. And then also through the 1900s through literature, we started exploring how could we mate differently. But what's really interesting is that the romantic regime did not peak until after World War II. So we, we experienced something that was really unexpected, because in the, in the 1910s and '20s, we were moving away from romantic love, we wanted female equality, we were moving toward confluent love. But then after World War II, we, we exp- had this enormous economic prosperities that allowed us to implement the romantic utopia, which is the breadwinner housewife model. So suddenly, marriage in the West became near universal. Almost everyone married, they married young, and now we got to experience that the romantic utopia has a couple of shortcomings. Number one, life does... love generally doesn't last a lifetime, and the utopia staying at home wasn't that great for all women. So this, uh, you had this in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, and then you have the social revolution of the 1960s, and you could say, uh, symbolically that, uh, the breakthrough of confluent love was in, in, uh, 1968. And then you start seeing in the beginning of the '70s, around the mid-'70s, across the West, you see in the statistics that this modern matter- marriage pattern that we've had and that peaked after World War II, it just disintegrates. Divorce peaks, remarriage goes down, people marry later, you have a lot more, uh, casual sex outside of marriage, uh, people start having sex earlier, and you just see this complete change in the Western marriage pattern, uh, from the 1970s and on. And this is the, and this is s- this has mostly just gone in one direction, and this is the mating regime that we live under now, which has been, uh, accentuated through dating apps, through increased prosperity, through all that has happened in the past 40, 50 years.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:00:45

      When you say confluent love, am I right in thinking that what that means is our union, uh, works and continues to make sense for as long as you are useful to me and I'm useful to you?

   4. MLMads Larsen1:01:00

      Yeah. So romantic love, we merge for life, that's the only way to behold people. Confluent love, we come together either for an opportunistic short-term relationship, casual sex-...or for a romantic relationship for as long as we have emotions for each other or we benefit another way, and then we move on to singledom or another relationship. So we're not meant for each other for life, only for as long as we want to. So it's this confluence of people coming together and meeting and moving on.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:01:24

      Right. So now that we've arrived pretty much close to the modern era-

   6. MLMads Larsen1:01:28

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:01:29

      ...how do

10. 1:01:30 – 1:10:27

    What is Causing Today’s Mating Dysfunctions?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:01:30

       you, uh, how do you think of sort of modern dating dysfunction, demographic collapse-

    2. MLMads Larsen1:01:38

       Mm-hmm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:01:38

       ...uh, uh, all of that stuff, is that, uh, you know, from 1200, was that just the first domino gets flicked and it's an inevitable kind of p-p-p-p all the way along? How, how do you conceptualize this altogether?

    4. MLMads Larsen1:01:50

       Yeah. I, I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I, I, I completely agree with your intelligence behind that. Yeah. That is what set it in motion. We've always had arranged marriages and lived in kin groups, and then more strictly under agriculture, but still. And then we were set on this path toward individual choice and ever greater individualism. And then it's just, uh, to have, like we talked about in the very beginning, it's hard to convince people to take upon themself the burden of decades of pair bonding with the same person and providing for offspring. A- and when you have a strong individualistic culture and a mating ideology that says that this is optional, that you don't necessarily have to do that, we're facing an evolution that is quite predictable. And as you've talked about on many of your podcasts, it seems to be going the direction where we've ran out of tools. There's not much we could do. We had in the, in the 1930s, uh, uh, a decline in fertility also, which we countered. Uh, then it... The numbers I've seen in Scandinavia went down to 1.8, which was seen as a catastrophe, and then we countered through effectuating social democracy. We, we, we, uh, made it materially easier to have children through social democratic welfare. All that has played out now. That's, that's no longer an option. In, in Norway now, uh, a, a, a typical... With the average woman, she receives more than $1.2 million more from the state than she pays in taxes, while men pay more in taxes than they receive, and when even that can't, uh, motivate, uh, reproduction at, at, at replacement levels, and, and this is... Norway's the richest country in the world and we have the best welfare system, and when even that kind of money transfer can't, uh, facilitate reproduction, there's very little other countries can do. So up until 2010, Scandinavia was an anomaly. Across the West, fertility has declined for a long time. So we thought that the answer would... or many thought that the answer was that other countries had to be like Scandinavia. They needed gender equality 'cause we were the most gender equal region, and they needed generous welfare. And now in the past decade, the Norwegian fertility rate dropped from, in the 2010, from 2.0 to 1.5, and now it's dropped down to 1.4, and that's with each woman on average being transferred $1.2 million over a lifetime. That's a lot of money. There's... Econ- economic incentives no longer cease to work. So we kinda know that for other countries too, that would only be a short-term solution that would be countered by other forces that are more powerful. So if we think it's a good idea to ke- still making, uh... to still make people and avoid a demographic collapse, it's very difficult to see what kind of means we can effectuate that would have a, a substantial effect that could turn this around.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:04:42

       What are the forces that are driving the decrease in, uh, fertility rates at the moment?

    6. MLMads Larsen1:04:52

       Well, the larger forces, uh, the material ones is urbanization, like we've talked about before and like many others have talked about, how there's been... When we lived as agriculturalists, having children was free labor and now they're just huge expenses. So that is, that is one issue. Um, the other one is ideological, that we no longer... With romantic love, the meaning of life was to merge with your partner and have a bunch of children. With, with confluent love, it's about self-realization, uh, reward, convenience. When we have those beliefs, it's just... We're just less incentivized to take upon ourself these burdens. So I also mentioned fear of the future, um, and then you have... What I've researched a bit is what happens with our mate preferences in this new environment of the past decades. How, um, on one side, when you make... Uh, as in Scandinavia, when you have gender equality and you have generous welfare, it makes it materially easier to have children. So that counts in a positive direction, but it also disincentivizes women from pair bonding with men of similar mate value. So that's another aspect of these ideologies in mating regimes that it's, it's really difficult to make women mate with men with, uh, with low mate value unless they have to, unless they are materially dependent on it or coerced to do so by their society. We have two attraction systems. We have the original one that we talked about when we started six million years ago were promiscuous maters, and this is a very discriminatory, uh, uh, system for women where they're supposed to only be, uh, promiscuously attracted by the very most attractive men. Maybe this is somewhere between 5 and 20% of men, probably closer to 5. And then 5, 4 million years ago, we evolved this other system to facilitate pair bonding, which is a much more, in a sense, democratic system where a, a, a much larger proportion of men is able to trigger that love mechanism that makes... that motivates a woman to mate with them. But we see that when women don't have to, they, uh, become choosier and they, uh, direct their efforts at men with higher mate value than what they have themselves, and that makes it harder to pair up more people within a community, which then will have adverse effects on their fertility.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:07:19

       Right. And when women are not...... financially or resourcefully beholden to their partner in order-

    8. MLMads Larsen1:07:26

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:07:26

       ... to be able to keep them ticking over because they have no job, they have no education, or they have limited, uh, socioeconomic opportunities.

    10. MLMads Larsen1:07:36

        Mm-hmm.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:07:36

        "Uh, I need to stay with my partner because the alternative is that me and potentially one, two, three, four, five children are out on the street." So we were basically kind of like a, a financial prisoner in some regards to their husband. And now that women don't need that anymore, the gloves are off.

    12. MLMads Larsen1:07:52

        Yeah, and, and for, for modern ideology, and I'm, I'm sure both you and I feel this way, this is great for women. Women aren't dependent on being with a man. They are, they are independent, they have their own money, their own economy, and they can make their own choices and they can choose, uh, to direct their efforts and compete harder for the high-value men instead of settling for someone with a similar value as themself. But then the consequence of that is that we have, uh, uh, we have a very high increase in singledom, we have a decline in fertility, and it also affects people's wellbeing. People generally express a desire to be pair bonded, and they wanna, they wanna be together with someone. That's kind of what we've been doing the last 4 million years. And then when people react to different incentives in the modern environment, we see that quite a few of those work counter to people being able to find each other and create relationships.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:08:40

        Yeah, I looked at a study, a pretty, what looked like significant assessment that said gender inequality, specifically when it comes to finances, is correlated with both male and female satisfaction in relationships.

    14. MLMads Larsen1:08:55

        Yep.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:08:55

        Which is a really, uh, if you wanna talk about like unfortunate, uh, uncomfortable, uh, realizations, that if you, as a man, are able to, whether by coercion or restriction or capacity or whatever, out-earn your female partner, and if the brakes are put on your female partner, she's happier and you're happier on average.

    16. MLMads Larsen1:09:22

        Yeah, no, if, if, there are so many depressive statistics.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:09:25

        (snorts)

    18. MLMads Larsen1:09:25

        If you wanna look at what actually get the fertility rate up, you have to, uh, if... What will really work is to, and we don't want any of this, we have to get rid of gender equality, get rid of prosperity, uh, domestic violence works. There's tons of stuff that work to, uh, to make women submit to being in a relationship that they otherwise-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:09:45

        Oh, to go-

    20. MLMads Larsen1:09:45

        ... wouldn't wanna be in.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:09:46

        Yeah, to go, stop being a, whatever it is, uh, cost-benefiting to, um, uh, what's it called when the man... There's two types of mate guarding, right?

    22. MLMads Larsen1:09:56

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:09:56

        Uh, uh, whatever the second one is. I know what you mean, yes.

    24. MLMads Larsen1:09:58

        Yeah. So no, there's, if you look at what actually would work to get the fertility rate up, these are very dystopic choices we have. There, there are, there are pretty much nothing that we in the West would be ideologically disposed to doing that could have a significant positive effect. All those mechanisms that we know would have an effect would be, go against what we believe in, so we're in a very difficult situation.

11. 1:10:27 – 1:23:11

    Are We On the Verge of a New Mating Era?

    1. MLMads Larsen1:10:27

    2. CWChris Williamson1:10:27

       One thing that has kinda been running through my mind as you've told us this tale is, especially when you look at the modern world, uh, which still has an awful lot of the carryover, I think, from the romantic era, uh, of, you know, uh, uh, moralizing around faithfulness, uh-

    3. MLMads Larsen1:10:43

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:10:43

       ... chastity, uh, loyalty to your partner, stuff like that. It, it seems so insane that we've managed to get ourselves to a place where our evolved mating psychology and the structures that we had for so, so, so long have just become perverted and perturbed and ruined and repurposed and countered and so on and so forth. And we are, you know, we talk about evolutionary mismatch an awful lot. Everybody knows what that is. But this seems to be like it's a, a fucking sedimentary rock of evolutionary mismatch, right? You know, you've got the, the culture from before and, and the counterculture to that culture, and then you've got new technology, reproductive technology. What about the fact that we're all individuals? Uh, what, what female socioeconomic access and egalitarianism?

    5. MLMads Larsen1:11:32

       Yeah.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:11:32

       That's fucking new. Like, how do we work that out? Um, we're no longer living in pan-generational houses. Our kin doesn't give us any advice about... When the world is moving so quickly that our parents' advice basically doesn't even work for the new generation because they don't understand what does it mean to be dating on Tinder. And then we've still got all of these vestigial mating systems from before.

    7. MLMads Larsen1:11:51

       Yep.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:11:51

       So it really doesn't surprise me, you know, when you take a really global look at human mating psychology plus the modern world plus the journey that our psychology has been dragged through, really, over the last few millennium, it's really not surprising that people are, are struggling at the moment.

    9. MLMads Larsen1:12:14

       Yeah, on top of that, dating apps are a little over a decade old and we haven't figured that out at all. And, and the incentives that drive those apps and those who create them are, goes so counter to people's, uh, to people's needs and desires and, and how our psychology functions. It's, we've put ourself in a situation where there's, like you say, there's so much novelty on top of novelty that men and women don't even understand what their mate preferences are and how those are being influenced by the social order and the technology they use to meet people. So we're just, we're following these 6-million-year-old impulses which are the strongest one and, and they're overriding impulses that are 4 million years old. N- not even to think about the newer ones that we've developed. And in all of this, we're in this uniquely new mating regime of individual choice that we have not evolved for at all. Uh, so it's, when you look back and you think, "Why was it that..." say perhaps through the, the, the two-million-year history of the genus Homo, if, if it is the case in fact that we always had parental choice through that, is it because everybody discovered that individual choice doesn't add up?I mean, there's no way the West is gonna go away from that, and I certainly wouldn't advocate it. But if no one else managed to figure that out, how sure are we that- that- that this is going to work for us? And yeah, if- if you extrapolate from today, if with this decline in fertility, maybe... I mean, we're certainly gonna ride out this experiment. I don't see us changing any- any- anyway. Uh, but there are- there are peoples around the world who aren't in- who aren't pursuing that regime that are showing different numbers. And it's... I mean, we love our ideology. We think it's superior to everybody else's ideology. That's just how humans work. But, uh, but there's- there's one fender... I mean, you could say everything is relative, but there's one thing that isn't relative. That's an evolutionary iron law. No matter what your ideology is, if that ideology causes you to stop reproducing, that ideology will cease to matter. You will disappear.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:14:30

        Yeah, I mean, this was one of the most interesting takeaways I've had from a lot of conversations about demographic collapse and population decline, which is, um, ideology, political leaning, your worldview at large, your openness, your conscientiousness, all the rest of those things are highly heritable. Highly heritable. Your political ideology is very highly heritable, right? As is the rest of your fucking psychology. So, if you are somebody that is part of a particular political movement that either doesn't promote or actively discriminates against reproduction, you are a dying breed, because your children would have more likely been like you. And look at the groups that are reproducing. Like, something tells me that conservative Ashkenazi Jews are not going to have that much of a fertility problem, right? Something tells me that Mormons or that, uh, some sects of Christianity, I know that some are down, but some sects of Christianity also going to be fine. So, what do you look at over a long enough time horizon? You actually look at this sort of almost, like, full circle loop back around to a much more, not necessarily puritanical, but like a religious, sacred view of what this is. And remember, if you are somebody that's conservative or somebody that's religious, the likelihood that your children are going to be that way is... it's absolutely not predetermined, but they are predisposed, right? So, you end up with this sort of ever-increasing cycle of this. So, there was a... there's an argument to be made, I think, that, uh, you know, like, antenatal climate-concerned liberalism is not long for this world, right? Uh, it's not to say that you can't have a- a sufficiently compelling ideology that comes around in 50 years' time and reconverts a bunch of seventh-generation conservatives or whatever. Uh, but yeah, you will end up with less, uh, demographic, uh, political variety over time if you have this, because the selection effect occurs within particular cohorts, within very particular strata, and it presses down very hard on them, and the other ones are just like, "What demographic collapse? I'm fine."

    11. MLMads Larsen1:16:54

        Yeah. Well, we also have some tremendous novelty coming up, which we have to bear in mind. I predict that the West will have a fourth sexual revolution, uh, coinciding with the fourth industrial revolution. What will happen when we start, uh, being able to create babies outside of- of women's wombs, when we'll be able to gene edit, et cetera, et cetera, and when we'll get AI robot lovers and- and- and spouses, et cetera, et cetera. There's gonna be such tremendous technological novelty that's going to change society that it's almost inconceivable that this will not have a tremendous effect also on mating. So, if we extrapolate into the future without taking that into account, yes, then the West as it function now would just mate itself out of existence and other groups would take over who have higher fertility. But that doesn't seem to be the future we are facing. There's- there will be so much change in the decades ahead that it's very difficult to imagine how mating will be in the future. But I- I- I think that revolution will be s- will be so large that it will fundamentally change that aspect. Like we talked about in the beginning, the foundation of every social order is mating. So, then the question is, how will these new technologies affect how we mate, and how will that create a new foundation for a new form of society?

    12. CWChris Williamson1:18:19

        Yeah. Yeah. I- I suppose we are living maybe in the last death throes of something that even slightly resembles an ancestral mating system. You know, as soon as- as soon as you have external wombs, as soon as you have AI companions that can give you better than real life love, uh, yeah, the pod hikikomori problem gets sorted, but it only gets sorted from the individual's perspective. From the population perspective, it's not sorted at all. But then if you can counter that with artificial wombs... But then who is it that you're choosing... Like, whose genes are you choosing to do this? And if you have, you know, embryo selection, which is already online, you know, embryo selection for IQ, for externalizing behavior, for depression, for anxiety, for autism, you already have this. And then if you can get into gene editing, and then if you can get into IVG and it's like, "Okay, here's like a... here's a section of the skin from my arm. Go forth and make 1 million Chris Williamsons," like, I... Jesus Christ. But yeah, I... it's, uh... (laughs) Maybe we are, maybe this is, uh, a- a uniquely interesting time, but I wonder whether...... I wonder whether some of the interventions that we are, uh, thinking about at the moment, you know, uh, Hungary, y- you have one kid and you do this thing, and you have two kids and you get more taxes off, and you have three kids and you don't pay taxes for life. Or Norway and the way that you guys, 1.2 million that you give to women and, you know, uh, we need to get people to do CBT to overcome approach anxiety and all of the rest of it. I wonder whether ultimately all of those things are going to be in vain within the space of five decades because the technology is just going to rip out anything that we try to construct using, like, uh, like, cultural technology, ideological movement. Oh, Hollywood, why don't we get Hollywood to, like, put dads that are competent again at the front? And we shouldn't have Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as the lead. We should have, like, you know, like, a good standup family guy. And you're like, yeah, but if in f- five decades i- it's artificial wombs and sex robots all the way down, like, w- what does any, what do any of those interventions really matter? That's not to say that making the wellbeing and flourishing of people who live right now isn't nothing. But over a long enough time horizon, they all just get, like, someone shakes the Etch A Sketch and just deletes all mating history.

    13. MLMads Larsen1:20:44

        Yeah. No, um, when you look at the history of Western mating, it's- it's I don't fear very much that we'll be returning to a, uh, A Handmaid's Tale puritan kind of female oppressing regime. I think we're going to move forward in that we will experience a- a novelty at a level that we, it's very difficult for us to imagine today. Uh, so yeah, it's, uh, w- we can talk about it. We can speculate. But, uh, d- when we are at this side of these big revolutions as we seem to be now, before we go into it and see how dramatically the world will change, and this time a lot more rapidly than with previous such revolutions, it's all we can do is- is mostly hold on. Like, I don't believe that there, I don't, I- I love what you're doing with your podcast, but I- I, people can get informed and that's good, but that somehow we're gonna figure something out, make a plan, and then effectuate it and (laughs) and stop the demographic collapse, that doesn't seem to be how the world works. Um, it's just gonna be a whirlwind, uh, a hurricane of change.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:21:52

        Yeah.

    15. MLMads Larsen1:21:52

        And then at the end of it, I think it would be really cool if we still have a bunch of humans around. I'm kind of, I'm- I'm a little bit specieist that way. But things can play out in a matter of ways that are- are just impossible to predict on this side of the singularity.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:22:09

        Yeah. Yeah. It's the technological change, the size of the wall that occurs is so high that it's very difficult to have something permeate through it. And yeah, I- I totally agree. One of the other things that you do, y- your other wing, one of your other, many other wings, uh, eh, an evolutionary lens on wellbeing.

    17. MLMads Larsen1:22:28

        Yeah.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:22:28

        And obviously, we've had a lot of conversations recently about, uh, incels, and I only learned this from you, insincs as well-

    19. MLMads Larsen1:22:35

        Yeah.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:22:35

        ... involuntary singletons. Um-

    21. MLMads Larsen1:22:37

        Mm-hmm.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:22:38

        G- given your evolutionary lens background and your studies into wellbeing, what are you making of the general generalized anxiety, uh, depressive states, you know, whatever it is, uh, 50% of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness. You know, you've got guys with testosterone in the toilet. The single biggest threat to a man under the age of 50 is his own hands, you know, in terms of suicidality, all this sort of stuff.

    23. MLMads Larsen1:23:07

        Mm-hmm.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:23:08

        Um, what, w- how do you sort of conceptualize all

12. 1:23:11 – 1:34:27

    Why Are People So Unhappy?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:23:11

       of this together from a wellbeing perspective? Why are the incels and the insincs and everybody else so unhappy?

    2. MLMads Larsen1:23:16

       Yeah. No, that's something I think we should really be concerned with. Uh, uh, we- we should try to change the world and make a better world but as- as we've spoken a- about, it's, our ability to effect change that way is somewhat limited. But when we're going through these deep changes as we are now and we have before, people will face despair. They will lose faith in the story that has united us. We haven't yet found tomorrow's ideology that will give us the answers and the comfort and lessen our anxiety. So we really should be sympathetic towards each other and that pain that people are suffering when we go through these changes, 'cause these changes are very hard on humans. We like stable periods when we know, when we convince the self that we know what truth is. So when you look at incels and insincs, you should expect them to, that they should be miserable. From an evolutionary perspective, uh, happiness is a reward you experience when you solve adaptably, adaptively relevant problems. And nothing is more central to adaptivity than reproduction. So if you're not succeeding on short or long-term mating markets, if you're not able to pair bond, your wellbeing system should go into high alert and let you know that your strategies are failing. So when men become depressed and despondent from not succeeding on the short-term market and women become depressed and despondent 'cause they notice on modern dating markets they have unlimited access to sex with higher value men but none of these men, uh, are willing to pair bond with them, that is supposed to give you depression. That's your, that's your organism telling you that you're failing. So instead of villainizing, uh, incel men or making fun of insinc women, we should try to spread a better understanding. And here, your podcast is valuable. People need to understand the different mate preferences that men and women have. They should understand the different power dynamics in short and long-term mating and see how today's mating, particularly with dating apps, is creating a stratification that is creating dysfunction for almost all groups of society, or at least potentially. So a better understanding of what is going on might not help us steer this- this clown car into safe shores, but it might help us sympathize more- more with each other's plights, especially, uh, between men and women because men and women have such different challenges in today's dating economy. And if we kind of, if men impulse...... male mate preferences in their analysis of how women are doing, and opposite. We just don't understand each other, and that just creates bigger dysfunction, poorer communication, and people get even more miserable.

Episode duration: 1:46:39